Prattling about the petty with great pique.

2004.03.31

The void in comics coverage

I wish comic books got more mainstream coverage in the press, the way any other distinctive art genre does. I subscribe to a few different arts newsletters, read a few different arts weblogs (ArtsJournal and Arts and Letters Daily being the two most obvious examples), and although everything from modern dance to postmodern theory gets covered, nobody looks at comics. What will it take? Forcing Scott McCloud to live on the road as a prostelyzing nomad? Making The Comics Journal required reading for media-studies undergrads?

I bring this up because there are stories I'd like to see more of -- like what happens to a Green Arrow, a Spiderman or an X-Men title when a Hollywood scribe comes in and writes a storyline, or what the experience of watching a movie is like for the scribes who have created the canon for a book. I have yet to see any mainstream arts-coverage interviews with Chris Claremont asking how he feels about the movie treatment of the X-Men relative to the character development he's done, or an explanation for why we don't hear from the Mark Millars, the Chris Claremonts, the Grant Morrisons when a comic book goes Hollywood.

And I bring this up because there are stories like the one in the Village Voice's March 30 issue, "Readers of the Last Aardvark," which offers the only remotely mainstream press (i.e. widely accessible for an audience that isn't comic-geeky) on the ending of one of the most ambitious and repellent comic efforts ever, Dave Sim's Cerebus.

Why repellent? Because, despite the awesome scope of the project -- 300 issues, from 1979 to this month, cranked out by one guy -- it's a deeply, crazily misogynistic work. Like, not at all connected with reality crazy, as per this TCJ piece accompanying this epic essay explaining why I, along with all other women "want to be raped by rich, muscular, handsome doctors," "[am an] emotion-based being" incapable of processing either sense or reason, and on and on. While the whole thing could provide someone studying the rhetoric of logic ample dissertation material -- or give someone with about a week's worth of free time and a passion for logical fallacies a new annotation project -- it's also part of the comic series. Sims wrote his world view into the story. (Suck's piece is the best in putting the essay in context with Sims' body of work.)

Like a lot of other people, I stopped reading around this time. Guess my feelings of repugnance and my inability to distinguish myself from animals (also a Sims tenet) barred me from seeing the higher sense in a comic centering around an animal protagonist-cum-Sims stand-in. Life is short, and there are many other good comic books out there; I don't feel the need to revisit this one and marvel about how Sims actually contradicted his own beliefs in the comic, or may be engaging in a vast and subtle parody, or whatever your explanation may be.

In any event, despite -- or because of -- the whackjob direction Cerebus went in over the course of its career, it should have been examined and summed up with at least as much ink as has been devoted to the ending of Friends, which is a mere piker at only ten years old. Cerebus as a creative work is an excellent story. More people should have been able to learn about it.